I play no-limit cash games regularly both live and online. I prefer to play live, and a major reason is because live players are for the most part much easier to read. It’s not that I can magically decode an opponent’s every twitch and tic. Physical tells are sometimes useful, Two No-Limit Plays That Make [...]

Your no-limit hold’em opponents bluff. I know it may shock you, but it’s true. Are you just going to let them get away with it, or are you going to do something about it? If you don’t have a good plan for dealing with your opponents’ bluffs, you may want to Picking Off Bluffs|980|3.95|USD|| just [...]

The longer I’ve played poker, the more I’ve become convinced that a single concept is truly at the core of nearly all successful strategies. It’s a concept that is as important playing no-limit hold’em as it is at limit stud eight-or-better. This central concept is extracting thin value. It’s a simple Thin Value|974|3.95|USD|| idea. On [...]

Last issue I wrote about how the most useful way to read hands relies on the concept of hand ranges. Because your opponents do not provide you perfect information with their checks, bets, and raises, you cannot quickly narrow down their holdings to just one or a few hands. Board Textures And Hand Ranges|971|3.95|USD|| Instead, [...]

Reading hands is a critical poker skill. The better you can key in on the sort of hands your opponents have, the better decisions you will make, and the better your results will be. Most players use some sort of hand reading process to inform their decisions. But not all hand Reading Hands Using Hand [...]

In Understanding Deception: Part 2, I introduced the concept of reading your own hand and using that process to identify situations where you tend to play too straightforwardly. In this installment I wanted to offer a few specific examples of how to add deception to your game. If you’ve Playing Deceptively – Part 3: Adding [...]

In Understanding Deception: Part 1 I introduced the notion of a deceptive strategy as opposed to a deceptive play. A slowplay by itself, for instance, cannot be deceptive because it is just one play. Indeed, if you slowplay habitually you will often end up with a strategy that is not deceptive at all. A deceptive [...]

Lately I’ve been thinking about deception in poker, and I decided to write a modest series of articles describing my take on exactly what deception means and how to play in a deceptive way. I think if you asked people to define what it means to play poker “deceptively” I think most of them would [...]

The idea of a player “limiting” their hand range is a critical hand reading concept. The basic idea is this: Anyone who has a very strong hand wants to get money in the pot. They’ll be looking for an opportunity to do that. If your opponent bypasses one or more excellent opportunities to go for [...]

In no-limit, fairly frequently you have to lay down “big” hands like top pair, top kicker or a medium two pair because your opponent is representing something even bigger. Unfortunately, these are also sometimes hands you want to beat your opponent into the pot with. It can be hard to figure out if this is [...]